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+1 for Proxmox, has been a fun experience as there are plenty of resources and helper scripts to get you off the ground, jellyfin was the first thing I migrated from my PC, hardware encoding may give you a bit of a tussle but nothing unsolveable. Also note Proxmox is Debian under the hood, so you may find it easy to work with. I looked into unraid, it seems great if all you’re doing for the most part is storage, if you want Linux containers and virtual machines, proxmox js your bet.
I got a small 4 bay 2U server from a friend on the cheap, 1000$ should get you relatively nice new or slightly older used hardware. Even just a PC with a nice amount of drive bays will get you started. And drives are cheap, a raid 1 setup was one of the things I did.
In the end I’ll likely get a separate NAS rack server just to segregate functions, but as of now I simply have a Proxmox LXC mounted to my NAS drives and runs samba to expose them.
Tailscale is a nice set and forget solution for VPN access, I ended up going the route of getting an SSL certified domain and beefing up my firewall a bit. The bit I’ve messed with it it certainly has a learning curve greater than openvpn, but is much more hardened and versatile.
As for pihole, I’ve found AdGuard Home to be just about a suitable replacement, and can be installed along openwrt, though I have a bit of an unconventional router with 512MB of RAM so YMMV
Alternatively, use a closed ecosystem susceptible to data rot and loss.
Would you want art to be unfindable because scraping for AI image generation happens? It’s a solution looking for problems.